Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project

Measure Threats

We monitor websites and services to find out what user data companies collect, how they collect it, and what they do with it. With our measurement platform, we study privacy, security, and ethics of consumer data usage.

Create Change

Our external oversight exposes the privacy practices of companies and forces them to make improvements. In addition, the data and studies that we produce assist regulators and privacy tool developers in their efforts.

Inform the Public

We translate our research into practical information for public consumption. We aim to improve the accuracy of media reports about online privacy and to provide useful advice for consumers on this website.

Princeton Web Census

We are working on a monthly, automated, web-scale measurement of tracking and privacy, comprising 1 million sites. This "web census" will detect and measure many or most of the types of known privacy violations reported by researchers so far: circumvention of cookie blocking, leakage of PII to third parties, canvas fingerprinting, and more. Read the paper and check out the
results and data.

The Web Never Forgets

Our researchers at KU Leuven and Princeton collaborated on The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild. It is the first large-scale study of three advanced web tracking mechanisms: canvas fingerprinting, evercookies, and cookie syncing.
Go more in-depth with press coverage or the technical information on the paper's website.